Abstract

Bad Boy, Good Manners

This article discusses the career of young artist John Currin. Few of the good things that reward the rising--or risen--young artist have not fallen to John Currin in recent days. He is the subject of a widely celebrated mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. According to a headline in the Times, he has "startled" the art world by switching dealers, from Andrea Rosen to Gagosian, one of the toniest galleries in the hierarchy. Over the past decade, Currin paintings of startlingly busty young women in mini-skirts and tight blouses have aroused the ire of a dour and censorious art establishment, which had marginalized painting as a medium, vilified the "male gaze" and monitored political incorrectness with a near-Victorian zealousness. What I find astounding is that in little more than a decade, Currin should have outgrown the aggressive thrift-shop style of his early portraits to become a virtuoso of a style and manner that would have been admired in Ferrara or Parma in the 1550s--and that Mannerism, with its artifice and virtuosity, should of all things define one of the brightest art stars of the early twenty-first century!